"Also, you have a CPU-bound SAN solution? Tell me more."
That's exactly the opposite of what I said. If you had taken the time to read my post, you would have noticed that I said that SAN solutions are frequently memory-bandwidth bound. Which is exactly what Opteron delivers in spades.
"Yes. And you?"
No. I work for a small system integrator. It's generally not polite to pimp your product in a completely unrelated article. But, you work for Apple and this is Slashdot, so it must be OK.
"Actually, the other item I linked was the support article showing the actual power draw and BTU's generated."
Again, it was hosted on Apple's website. At my company, we know not to trust vendor thermal specifications. Pentium 4 Prescott CPUs, for example, frequently dissipate 30-40W more than Intel's stated TDP. We don't know the conditions under which your tests were conducted. We want to conduct the tests ourselves before forming an opinion.
"In your experience what's the mix between memory bound and cpu bound applications?"
Well, it depends on the client. Fortunately for AMD, Opteron is a very strong architecture on both fronts. It is the combination of high-bandwidth, low latency memory, strong integer and floating-point performance, and strong I/O bandwidth that make Opteron such a compelling platform. PPC970 offers two of the three.
"It's great that you're picking the real-world winner based on testing. That's exactly what you should do. In my experience we win sometimes and Opteron wins sometimes, but we usually win on price/performance when factoring in the cost of power and cooling for large systems."
In our space, you never win. You don't have large-memory capabilities or redundant PSUs. That, combined with the lack of a supported Linux distro, makes XServe a non-starter.
"Funny, I thought we were selling a commercially-supported UNIX distro, and that our server sales were going up. I guess our customers are buying things they don't want!:)"
You are still small in the server space, precicely because you are selling a "UNIX" distro. Where is the ISV support? Does DB2, Oracle, or MSSQL run on your systems? It's not just the hardware, it's the software.
You can win in technical computing clusters where downtime is acceptable and the software is compiled by the client. Unfortunately, that's a small part of the server market. Until there is strong ISV support for PPC970 / OS X Server, you're not going to break out of that market.
"Have a great day, and try to relax a little.:)"
You too, but try not to post links to vendor-sponsored benchmarks.
We all know that the P4 3.2C "Northwood" creamed the Athlon XP 3200+ "Barton", but AMD's benchmarks didn't show it. And we all knew how lethargic the 1.42GHz G4 was (particularly with the slow FSB it was on), but Apple's benchmarks didn't show it. And we all know that Linux has lower TCO than Windows Server 2003, but Microsoft's report doesn't show it.
I know what my company's slicks say and what the truth is. Marketing rarely matches reality. Don't post marketing on Slashdot.
"So, for 20% to 30% more performance, according to your numbers"
20% to 30% PER CPU. The DL585 is a 4-way (soon to be 8-way) box with iLO, 64GB memory capacity, and a whole swath of other features that the XServe G5 cannot match. You cannot run an enterprise-class DBMS on the XServe - it doesn't even have redundant power.
You *cannot* compare a 64GB, 4/8-way Opteron server with redundant power and cooling to the XServe G5. Hell, can you even replace the fans in the G5 while it's on?
"But, I do think it illustrates my point that the Xserve often has better price/performance when you factor in power and cooling expense."
The XServe is not an enterprise-class server. It lacks the features that even many low-end PC servers have - important things like redundant power, SCSI, and large memory capabilities.
Downtime is not acceptable. It's not OK to have the DB server crash because the PSU crapped out. It's not OK to have to take it offline to replace dead fans or dead disks.
Oh, and again, our customers want Linux or (in some cases) Windows. Not a "BSD-based" commercial OS.
"Here's a recently updated performance benchmark on the G5."
No, it's not. It's an Apple marketing piece. As is the other iterm that you linked.
DO NOT trust manufacturer benchmarks. They are always manipulated - usually by careful choice of the tests run.
Let me guess, you work for Apple?
"The Opteron can certainly win on synthetic benchmarks that test memory bandwidth due to the memory architecture, but most people don't actually need that bandwidth."
It can also win on applications that use lots of memory bandwidth. Databases, for example, are almost always bandwidth-hungry. So are distributed filesystems. Many technical and scientific computing applications are also memory-bound.
"When testing actual customer code we're usually the same or better in performance, with lower power draw and less heat generation. As always, your mileage may vary."
Our mileage does vary. My company has compared PPC970, Xeon, and Opteron using the SAN solution that we integrate, and Opteron is the clear winner. For database systems as well, Opteron is 20-30% faster than Xeon and PPC970.
Moreover, XServe doesn't support more than 8GB of memory. That's simply not enough for our customers. Heck, the 64GB provided by HP's DL585 *still* isn't enough.
Look, Apple has some nice products, but without a true commercially-supported Linux distro, it's hard to sell your product. People buying servers want Linux or Windows, and they want something that is supported by the vendor.
"Look, it's a good idea to have different opposing viewpoints."
Not when one of those viewpoints is valid science and the other viewpoint is unverifiable conjecture.
"How else are our young going to learn to choose what they believe is best?"
Well, let's see - there's this thing that a lot of parents put their children in on Sunday. A sort of "school" for religion. Maybe they could learn their religion there?
"There are many holes and unexplained elements in this theory."
As there are in any theory. That doesn't mean that ID is right. It's sort of like arguing "well, this car doesn't look like a Ford, so it must be a Chevy".
ID is not right simply because evolution isn't 100% correct.
"Which amendment states: "The separation of church and state shall not be abridged.""
Which amendment states that you have an explicit right to prviacy? Which amendment states that the president has a right to a cabinet? Which amendment states that the Supreme Court has the right of judicial review?
There are lots of things that are inferred from the Constitution. It's a terse document, and it's not intended to be a laundry list of every right that we have. That's why we have the 10th amendment.
"I bet nobody on Slashdot will be able to figure this one out."
Oh! You got me! It doesn't say "separation of church and state" in the Consitution. Of course, there are a *lot* of things that we adhere to that aren't in the Constitution. It's a baseline document, not the body of our law.
You have to look at case law to understand the meaning of the Constitution. Apparently, you haven't learned the meaning of the word "precedent". I suggest you learn how our government really works before spouting off misinformed mistruths.
"Note that Congress, not public schools, is the entity mentioned in this amendment."
The restrictions in the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well. And guess who is trying to make laws that force the teaching of religous beliefs in class?
"So don't tell me that's what the almighty Constitition states, because it doesn't."
I will tell you that's what the Constitution says because it is *exactly* what the Constitution says. Here we have a governmental institution attempting to establish a religous belief in the classroom.
That sounds like "establishment of religion" to me.
"Apparantly. And the RIAA is using civil law to punish people (and profit!) for what has traditionally been the sort of thing that has been a criminal case."
Uhhh... no? Copyright infringement has only recently been punishable under criminal law, and only then in limited circumstances.
"It seems to be the new legal `thing' -- when criminal charges fail, go with civil charges. OJ was found innocent of murder (I certainly agree that he seemed guilty, but `beyond a reasonable doubt' ? Probably not...) but he lost the civil suit, and made the family of his dead wife lots of money. "
OJ was found "not guilty". He was not found to be innocent. The family has the right to sue for damages. You'd probably do the same thing.
"Maybe it's time to start applying criminal trial standards (i.e. you can't be forced to inciminate yourself, `beyond a reasonable doubt', court appointed attorney for those that can't afford their own, etc.) to certain sorts of civil cases, because they're being used like criminal cases."
Except that they aren't. The RIAA is suing for damages. They can't put you in jail. Moreover, you aren't fighting the government. It's not the same thing.
As someone who has had the chance to both work in my district's IT department (summer job) and attend school there, let me give you the scoop:
- We're Windows 2000 / AD, all the way. - The grade system is run on a separate server that isn't part of the domain - Remote login (terminal services) is disabled on the grade server - The grade server (and domain controllers, for that matter) are stored in a decently secure server space (in a dedicated IT building, with RFID locks). - Backups are done regularly to tape with offsite rotation - Logs are monitored regularly for abuse - The district IT staff is well-qualified and generally well-informed
Generally, the worst problem is that the staff is overworked. It's good that they are asking you to detail security problems that you have found.
"they use SonicWall"
SonicWall has a very nice solution. We use it at my current company. Of course, I have all of the passwords (I am a quasi-IT director). We don't bother with content filtering, but we do block any system from accessing the internet unless they have the SonicWall antivirus software (based on McAfee) installed and up-to-date.
Yeah, around 725km. Though, remember, that's a "regional" flight that's done on a small aircraft (~50 people). Such a route could not support regular high-speed train service (~150 people a day), so it would require infrequent service (e.g. once a day) or high subsidies to make up for the lack of travel. Moreover, even a 300kph train takes two hours to complete what is 45 minutes in the air.
Now try expanding that to LA-NY - it would be a 18+ hour train ride, even with no stops and a 300kph train. That's a far cry from the 5-6 hours it takes by air.
High-speed train service makes sense when there are dense population centers that are close together. In the US, the only place where that exists is Boston-NY-DC. And, as expected, that's the only place in the US where there is high-speed train service (Acela).
Amtrak needs to focus on improving service in the Boston-DC corridor rather than on building out routes that no one will use. Denver-LA service is neither profitable nor necessary.
"Who would have guessed 5 years ago that Apple would be Wall street's darling and growing its stock by leaps and bounds while Microsoft software is languishing its stock is stagnant and not meeting expectations?"
Microsoft grew earnings 5% over last year, a very impressive feat considering that they haven't released a new OS since 2001.
They are a mature company, and they have achieved market saturation in many of their sectors. Any growth at all is impressive.
Moreover, they still make about 3.5 times more revenue per year than Apple - without a strong hardware business.
"My sister just got here laptop in december and now they expect her to pay 100+ dollars to upgrade? She just bought her laptop, etc.. but she doesn't want to get too far behind version, what should she do, upgrade every x.0 upgrade?"
Oh, come on. I'm the biggest anti-Apple person around Slashdot (read my history), and even I don't think it's a big deal to pay for OS upgrades.
If you don't need the new functionality, don't pay for it. There's nothing stopping you from keeping the Mac OS you have *right now*.
Now, if Apple ends security upgrades for Panther, that's another matter.
"So while the html may be coming from MS, everything else comes from Akamai."
So, the parts that are hard to generate (the parts that require CPU time) come from Microsoft, while the static content that requires lots of bandwidth comes from Akamai?
Wow. Microsoft uses a third-party to host their images. Shocking.
"By contrast power sockets and plugs differ by country."
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong.
Yes, different countries use different mains sockets, and they use different voltages / frequencies.
However, nearly every computer built in the last 10 years has a multivoltage / multifrequency power supply, and they always have the standard IEC socket.
When building a rack system, computers are connected to special power strips that have IEC sockets. Regardless of country, the cabling stays the same.
With Active-PFC power supplies, the voltage selection is automatic. Most notebook power supplies have automatic voltage selection as well. Heck, even my cellphone can run on 220V/50Hz.
"Will we be seeing HDTV cards coming out soon that take advantage of the fact that both Apple and Direct TV seem to be using the same technologies?"
No.
Over-the-air cards already exist, but those recieve ATSC broadcasts, which are compressed using regular old MPEG-2.
DirecTV had not, and will not, allow the production of a reciever card. This has to do with the attractiveness of pirating and/or rebroadcasting DirecTV.
"Note that comm satellites are just 'bent pipes'."
Not SPACEWAY. SPACEWAY is unique in that it can do routing and processing on the fly.
Of course, the MPEG-4 streams are still going to be compressed on the ground.
"Therefore, DirecTV could have used an existing satellite in orbit, or even shared space with someone else on a satellite..."
Not really. Their satellites are full, and unless they want to discontinue a big chunk of their current services (for their entire customer base), they need more satellite capacity.
SPACEWAY has the bandwidth to deliver HD local-into-local services. With only 3 satellites. That's far more than any other DBS company can provide for the time being.
"Any "visualphile" will know that a decent analogue signal usually looks a lot better than it's digital equivalent (ref: I'm comparing Digital Terrestrial to Digital Satellite and Cable services available in the UK)."
No, it doesn't. A clean analog signal looks better than an overcompressed digital signal, true. But a truly "clean" analog signal doesn't exist.
Compare the quality of DVD to the much-vaunted Laserdisc. LD is about as close as you can get to a "clean" analog signal, and it still had a number of quality issues (mostly related to color-space compression).
"They don't seem to be able to transmit TV in the current resolution without severely degrading the picture."
Evidently your cable and satellite providers in the UK suck. They do here, too. DirecTV's picture is already overcompressed garbage.
That's why we're so psyched about SPACEWAY - there's plenty of bandwidth to transmit every local channel in the US, in HD, with a decent bitrate.
"My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts..."
There is plenty of bandwidth with SPACEWAY. Bandwidth will now be in the 10-12MBit range, up from 1-2MBit for DirecTV's current SD service. They're using MPEG-4, too, so that provides an additional quality increase.
If you're worried about 1080i looking poor at 12MBPS, keep in mind that Microsoft's WMV-HD demos (at 1080p, no less) are in that range. Go download one and take a look for yourself.
DirecTV also won't be re-encoding MPEG-2 boradcasts - they will get a clean signal that they can encode, just like they do today with MPEG-2.
"Maybe with Fiber To The Home we might actually get enough bandwidth to watch the channels we want at the resolution we want, without thinking that it looks like your TV has gone though 4 copes of RealPlayer..."
FTTP is completely unnecessary for the cable company. The coax they have in the ground right now is already capable of delivering 120+ HD channels at full broadcast bitrate (~20mbps). That's only counting the spectrum they are currrently using for analog channels.
There's plenty of bandwidth with the current coax. There's no need for FTTP just to get decent HD services.
"True-ish, however the use of AAC isn't really a DRM issue, it's simply a case of a company selling music in a format that can only be processed by their own music players."
The use of AAC is a non-issue. The use of a proprietary encryption-wrapped AAC format *is* an issue.
Apple is using their encryption in an anticompetitive manner. They are using their two near-monopoly businesses (iPod and iTMS) to keep other companies out of the market.
It's exactly what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and Windows - you can't have one without the other.
Personally, I'm not playing along. The first thing that I do when I buy a track from iTMS is to decrypt it with JHymn.
I already have an MP3 player (Rio 500) that suits my needs - I'm not going to buy an iPod just because I want to play my purchased music.
Excluding programs like JHymn, if you buy an iPod, you're stuck with CDs (ick) or iTMS. If you buy tracks from iTMS, forget loading them onto any other MP3 player.
It's DRM at its worst - encumbering consumer rights and subverting the free market. I'm just surprised that no one on Slashdot seems to care.
Not quite. Longhorn is RTM on May 24, 2006, so it will be at least 1 year and a month before Longhorn is ready.
Of course, Longhorn won't actually launch on May 24, 2006. Expected availability is July-October 2006, depending on readiness of other Microsoft products.
Slashdot Mirror
"Also, you have a CPU-bound SAN solution? Tell me more."
:)"
:)"
That's exactly the opposite of what I said. If you had taken the time to read my post, you would have noticed that I said that SAN solutions are frequently memory-bandwidth bound. Which is exactly what Opteron delivers in spades.
"Yes. And you?"
No. I work for a small system integrator. It's generally not polite to pimp your product in a completely unrelated article. But, you work for Apple and this is Slashdot, so it must be OK.
"Actually, the other item I linked was the support article showing the actual power draw and BTU's generated."
Again, it was hosted on Apple's website. At my company, we know not to trust vendor thermal specifications. Pentium 4 Prescott CPUs, for example, frequently dissipate 30-40W more than Intel's stated TDP. We don't know the conditions under which your tests were conducted. We want to conduct the tests ourselves before forming an opinion.
"In your experience what's the mix between memory bound and cpu bound applications?"
Well, it depends on the client. Fortunately for AMD, Opteron is a very strong architecture on both fronts. It is the combination of high-bandwidth, low latency memory, strong integer and floating-point performance, and strong I/O bandwidth that make Opteron such a compelling platform. PPC970 offers two of the three.
"It's great that you're picking the real-world winner based on testing. That's exactly what you should do. In my experience we win sometimes and Opteron wins sometimes, but we usually win on price/performance when factoring in the cost of power and cooling for large systems."
In our space, you never win. You don't have large-memory capabilities or redundant PSUs. That, combined with the lack of a supported Linux distro, makes XServe a non-starter.
"Funny, I thought we were selling a commercially-supported UNIX distro, and that our server sales were going up. I guess our customers are buying things they don't want!
You are still small in the server space, precicely because you are selling a "UNIX" distro. Where is the ISV support? Does DB2, Oracle, or MSSQL run on your systems? It's not just the hardware, it's the software.
You can win in technical computing clusters where downtime is acceptable and the software is compiled by the client. Unfortunately, that's a small part of the server market. Until there is strong ISV support for PPC970 / OS X Server, you're not going to break out of that market.
"Have a great day, and try to relax a little.
You too, but try not to post links to vendor-sponsored benchmarks.
We all know that the P4 3.2C "Northwood" creamed the Athlon XP 3200+ "Barton", but AMD's benchmarks didn't show it. And we all knew how lethargic the 1.42GHz G4 was (particularly with the slow FSB it was on), but Apple's benchmarks didn't show it. And we all know that Linux has lower TCO than Windows Server 2003, but Microsoft's report doesn't show it.
I know what my company's slicks say and what the truth is. Marketing rarely matches reality. Don't post marketing on Slashdot.
"So, for 20% to 30% more performance, according to your numbers"
20% to 30% PER CPU. The DL585 is a 4-way (soon to be 8-way) box with iLO, 64GB memory capacity, and a whole swath of other features that the XServe G5 cannot match. You cannot run an enterprise-class DBMS on the XServe - it doesn't even have redundant power.
You *cannot* compare a 64GB, 4/8-way Opteron server with redundant power and cooling to the XServe G5. Hell, can you even replace the fans in the G5 while it's on?
"But, I do think it illustrates my point that the Xserve often has better price/performance when you factor in power and cooling expense."
The XServe is not an enterprise-class server. It lacks the features that even many low-end PC servers have - important things like redundant power, SCSI, and large memory capabilities.
Downtime is not acceptable. It's not OK to have the DB server crash because the PSU crapped out. It's not OK to have to take it offline to replace dead fans or dead disks.
Oh, and again, our customers want Linux or (in some cases) Windows. Not a "BSD-based" commercial OS.
Try getting Oracle to run on OS X server.
"Here's a recently updated performance benchmark on the G5."
No, it's not. It's an Apple marketing piece. As is the other iterm that you linked.
DO NOT trust manufacturer benchmarks. They are always manipulated - usually by careful choice of the tests run.
Let me guess, you work for Apple?
"The Opteron can certainly win on synthetic benchmarks that test memory bandwidth due to the memory architecture, but most people don't actually need that bandwidth."
It can also win on applications that use lots of memory bandwidth. Databases, for example, are almost always bandwidth-hungry. So are distributed filesystems. Many technical and scientific computing applications are also memory-bound.
"When testing actual customer code we're usually the same or better in performance, with lower power draw and less heat generation. As always, your mileage may vary."
Our mileage does vary. My company has compared PPC970, Xeon, and Opteron using the SAN solution that we integrate, and Opteron is the clear winner. For database systems as well, Opteron is 20-30% faster than Xeon and PPC970.
Moreover, XServe doesn't support more than 8GB of memory. That's simply not enough for our customers. Heck, the 64GB provided by HP's DL585 *still* isn't enough.
Look, Apple has some nice products, but without a true commercially-supported Linux distro, it's hard to sell your product. People buying servers want Linux or Windows, and they want something that is supported by the vendor.
"Look, it's a good idea to have different opposing viewpoints."
Not when one of those viewpoints is valid science and the other viewpoint is unverifiable conjecture.
"How else are our young going to learn to choose what they believe is best?"
Well, let's see - there's this thing that a lot of parents put their children in on Sunday. A sort of "school" for religion. Maybe they could learn their religion there?
"There are many holes and unexplained elements in this theory."
As there are in any theory. That doesn't mean that ID is right. It's sort of like arguing "well, this car doesn't look like a Ford, so it must be a Chevy".
ID is not right simply because evolution isn't 100% correct.
"Which amendment states: "The separation of church and state shall not be abridged.""
Which amendment states that you have an explicit right to prviacy? Which amendment states that the president has a right to a cabinet? Which amendment states that the Supreme Court has the right of judicial review?
There are lots of things that are inferred from the Constitution. It's a terse document, and it's not intended to be a laundry list of every right that we have. That's why we have the 10th amendment.
"I bet nobody on Slashdot will be able to figure this one out."
Oh! You got me! It doesn't say "separation of church and state" in the Consitution. Of course, there are a *lot* of things that we adhere to that aren't in the Constitution. It's a baseline document, not the body of our law.
You have to look at case law to understand the meaning of the Constitution. Apparently, you haven't learned the meaning of the word "precedent". I suggest you learn how our government really works before spouting off misinformed mistruths.
"Note that Congress, not public schools, is the entity mentioned in this amendment."
The restrictions in the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well. And guess who is trying to make laws that force the teaching of religous beliefs in class?
"So don't tell me that's what the almighty Constitition states, because it doesn't."
I will tell you that's what the Constitution says because it is *exactly* what the Constitution says. Here we have a governmental institution attempting to establish a religous belief in the classroom.
That sounds like "establishment of religion" to me.
"should be invaded by a U.N. force to restore democracy."
Go for it.
"Apparantly. And the RIAA is using civil law to punish people (and profit!) for what has traditionally been the sort of thing that has been a criminal case."
...) but he lost the civil suit, and made the family of his dead wife lots of money. "
Uhhh... no? Copyright infringement has only recently been punishable under criminal law, and only then in limited circumstances.
"It seems to be the new legal `thing' -- when criminal charges fail, go with civil charges. OJ was found innocent of murder (I certainly agree that he seemed guilty, but `beyond a reasonable doubt' ? Probably not
OJ was found "not guilty". He was not found to be innocent. The family has the right to sue for damages. You'd probably do the same thing.
"Maybe it's time to start applying criminal trial standards (i.e. you can't be forced to inciminate yourself, `beyond a reasonable doubt', court appointed attorney for those that can't afford their own, etc.) to certain sorts of civil cases, because they're being used like criminal cases."
Except that they aren't. The RIAA is suing for damages. They can't put you in jail. Moreover, you aren't fighting the government. It's not the same thing.
My district is completely the opposite.
As someone who has had the chance to both work in my district's IT department (summer job) and attend school there, let me give you the scoop:
- We're Windows 2000 / AD, all the way.
- The grade system is run on a separate server that isn't part of the domain
- Remote login (terminal services) is disabled on the grade server
- The grade server (and domain controllers, for that matter) are stored in a decently secure server space (in a dedicated IT building, with RFID locks).
- Backups are done regularly to tape with offsite rotation
- Logs are monitored regularly for abuse
- The district IT staff is well-qualified and generally well-informed
Generally, the worst problem is that the staff is overworked. It's good that they are asking you to detail security problems that you have found.
"they use SonicWall"
SonicWall has a very nice solution. We use it at my current company. Of course, I have all of the passwords (I am a quasi-IT director). We don't bother with content filtering, but we do block any system from accessing the internet unless they have the SonicWall antivirus software (based on McAfee) installed and up-to-date.
Yeah, around 725km. Though, remember, that's a "regional" flight that's done on a small aircraft (~50 people). Such a route could not support regular high-speed train service (~150 people a day), so it would require infrequent service (e.g. once a day) or high subsidies to make up for the lack of travel. Moreover, even a 300kph train takes two hours to complete what is 45 minutes in the air.
Now try expanding that to LA-NY - it would be a 18+ hour train ride, even with no stops and a 300kph train. That's a far cry from the 5-6 hours it takes by air.
High-speed train service makes sense when there are dense population centers that are close together. In the US, the only place where that exists is Boston-NY-DC. And, as expected, that's the only place in the US where there is high-speed train service (Acela).
Amtrak needs to focus on improving service in the Boston-DC corridor rather than on building out routes that no one will use. Denver-LA service is neither profitable nor necessary.
"We don't have the ryanairs, the easyjets and the germanwings that those europeans have."
No, but we do have the Southwests, the Frontiers, the JetBlues, and a number of other discount airlines.
Remember, flying from LA to NYC is *longer* than London to Moscow.
Even a regional flight like Albuquerque, NM to Denver, CO is 450miles.
Rail transit doesn't make sense with those distances.
"A movie can spoil a book you've previously read."
Good to know that someone kidnapped you and pried your eyes open, forcing you to watch the movie.
Come on! You always have the choice to *not see* the movie.
"Who would have guessed 5 years ago that Apple would be Wall street's darling and growing its stock by leaps and bounds while Microsoft software is languishing its stock is stagnant and not meeting expectations?"
Microsoft grew earnings 5% over last year, a very impressive feat considering that they haven't released a new OS since 2001.
They are a mature company, and they have achieved market saturation in many of their sectors. Any growth at all is impressive.
Moreover, they still make about 3.5 times more revenue per year than Apple - without a strong hardware business.
"My sister just got here laptop in december and now they expect her to pay 100+ dollars to upgrade? She just bought her laptop, etc.. but she doesn't want to get too far behind version, what should she do, upgrade every x.0 upgrade?"
Oh, come on. I'm the biggest anti-Apple person around Slashdot (read my history), and even I don't think it's a big deal to pay for OS upgrades.
If you don't need the new functionality, don't pay for it. There's nothing stopping you from keeping the Mac OS you have *right now*.
Now, if Apple ends security upgrades for Panther, that's another matter.
"So while the html may be coming from MS, everything else comes from Akamai."
So, the parts that are hard to generate (the parts that require CPU time) come from Microsoft, while the static content that requires lots of bandwidth comes from Akamai?
Wow. Microsoft uses a third-party to host their images. Shocking.
"By contrast power sockets and plugs differ by country."
Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong.
Yes, different countries use different mains sockets, and they use different voltages / frequencies.
However, nearly every computer built in the last 10 years has a multivoltage / multifrequency power supply, and they always have the standard IEC socket.
When building a rack system, computers are connected to special power strips that have IEC sockets. Regardless of country, the cabling stays the same.
With Active-PFC power supplies, the voltage selection is automatic. Most notebook power supplies have automatic voltage selection as well. Heck, even my cellphone can run on 220V/50Hz.
Ironically, the lead article is about Internet Explorer being the most standards-compliant browser around.
It's like bizarro-Slashdot.
If you're not violating copyright law, you're almost certainly violating trademark law.
Under trademark law, if you website is confusingly similar to Wal-Mart's, you could be guilty of trademark infringement.
If you had changed the marks to make it clear that you were *not* an official officer of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., you might have a case.
Wal-Mart sued because you were making rediculous claims while proporting to be them. It's damaging to their trademark and confusing to the consumer.
"Will we be seeing HDTV cards coming out soon that take advantage of the fact that both Apple and Direct TV seem to be using the same technologies?"
No.
Over-the-air cards already exist, but those recieve ATSC broadcasts, which are compressed using regular old MPEG-2.
DirecTV had not, and will not, allow the production of a reciever card. This has to do with the attractiveness of pirating and/or rebroadcasting DirecTV.
"Note that comm satellites are just 'bent pipes'."
Not SPACEWAY. SPACEWAY is unique in that it can do routing and processing on the fly.
Of course, the MPEG-4 streams are still going to be compressed on the ground.
"Therefore, DirecTV could have used an existing satellite in orbit, or even shared space with someone else on a satellite..."
Not really. Their satellites are full, and unless they want to discontinue a big chunk of their current services (for their entire customer base), they need more satellite capacity.
SPACEWAY has the bandwidth to deliver HD local-into-local services. With only 3 satellites. That's far more than any other DBS company can provide for the time being.
"No moron script kiddie is going to know how to even _attempt_ to delete the RPC service."
No, but with msconfig you can disable it. And then the system won't boot.
"Analog didn't suffer from this."
No, just ghosting, snow, and a wrath of other problems.
"But yet, just about every channel these days suffers from macro blocks at any given time."
That's because the signal is overcompressed. You don't notice macroblocking on DVDs very often, for example, because the bitrate is sufficent.
SPACEWAY provides enough bandwidth so that overcompression isn't a problem. At least not until they have 1500 more channels to add to their system.
"Any "visualphile" will know that a decent analogue signal usually looks a lot better than it's digital equivalent (ref: I'm comparing Digital Terrestrial to Digital Satellite and Cable services available in the UK)."
No, it doesn't. A clean analog signal looks better than an overcompressed digital signal, true. But a truly "clean" analog signal doesn't exist.
Compare the quality of DVD to the much-vaunted Laserdisc. LD is about as close as you can get to a "clean" analog signal, and it still had a number of quality issues (mostly related to color-space compression).
"They don't seem to be able to transmit TV in the current resolution without severely degrading the picture."
Evidently your cable and satellite providers in the UK suck. They do here, too. DirecTV's picture is already overcompressed garbage.
That's why we're so psyched about SPACEWAY - there's plenty of bandwidth to transmit every local channel in the US, in HD, with a decent bitrate.
"My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts..."
There is plenty of bandwidth with SPACEWAY. Bandwidth will now be in the 10-12MBit range, up from 1-2MBit for DirecTV's current SD service. They're using MPEG-4, too, so that provides an additional quality increase.
If you're worried about 1080i looking poor at 12MBPS, keep in mind that Microsoft's WMV-HD demos (at 1080p, no less) are in that range. Go download one and take a look for yourself.
DirecTV also won't be re-encoding MPEG-2 boradcasts - they will get a clean signal that they can encode, just like they do today with MPEG-2.
"Maybe with Fiber To The Home we might actually get enough bandwidth to watch the channels we want at the resolution we want, without thinking that it looks like your TV has gone though 4 copes of RealPlayer..."
FTTP is completely unnecessary for the cable company. The coax they have in the ground right now is already capable of delivering 120+ HD channels at full broadcast bitrate (~20mbps). That's only counting the spectrum they are currrently using for analog channels.
There's plenty of bandwidth with the current coax. There's no need for FTTP just to get decent HD services.
"Longhorn is going to represent Microsoft's last stand"
Oh, come on. You could have said that about Mac OS 9 - an OS that definately *was* a train-wreck.
Apple put out a shit OS for years, stumbled to get OS X out the door (10.0 was a disaster), but managed to recover.
Microsoft has billions in the bank and a stable revenue stream from new systems.
They aren't going away anytime soon. Longhorn may be a flop, but if it is, it's not the end for Microsoft. Not in the least.
"if MS attempts to "lock down" digital "rights", then people will be sprinting towards the Mac platform just as fast as they can"
Because, as we know, Apple's products are 100% DRM-free. And Apple has threatened sued anyone over violation of the DMCA.
Give it a rest.
"True-ish, however the use of AAC isn't really a DRM issue, it's simply a case of a company selling music in a format that can only be processed by their own music players."
The use of AAC is a non-issue. The use of a proprietary encryption-wrapped AAC format *is* an issue.
Apple is using their encryption in an anticompetitive manner. They are using their two near-monopoly businesses (iPod and iTMS) to keep other companies out of the market.
It's exactly what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and Windows - you can't have one without the other.
Personally, I'm not playing along. The first thing that I do when I buy a track from iTMS is to decrypt it with JHymn.
I already have an MP3 player (Rio 500) that suits my needs - I'm not going to buy an iPod just because I want to play my purchased music.
Excluding programs like JHymn, if you buy an iPod, you're stuck with CDs (ick) or iTMS. If you buy tracks from iTMS, forget loading them onto any other MP3 player.
It's DRM at its worst - encumbering consumer rights and subverting the free market. I'm just surprised that no one on Slashdot seems to care.
Not quite. Longhorn is RTM on May 24, 2006, so it will be at least 1 year and a month before Longhorn is ready.
Of course, Longhorn won't actually launch on May 24, 2006. Expected availability is July-October 2006, depending on readiness of other Microsoft products.